It’s no shock that the beauty industry has another scandal. The beauty community as a whole is known for its constant drama. This is not limited to false advertising scandals, but also public disagreements between popular creators. These dramas have been so prominent, people who are not interested in the beauty community know about these creators and the drama that ensued.
Mikayla Nogueira is a 24-year-old creator on TikTok who posts makeup looks, product reviews, and occasionally lifestyle content. She currently has 14.4 million followers and 1.1 billion likes on TikTok. Mikayla has had immense success after quitting her day job at Ulta and committing to full-time content creation. She is generally well-liked on TikTok for being real and she pushes the fact that she is not the “beauty standard.” Mikayla also often talks about her struggles with mental health and body dysmorphia. Mikayla often gets hate for being from Massachusetts and receives a lot of comments about her strong accent. Overall, she hasn’t received an overwhelmingly bad reaction to one of her videos.
On January 24, 2023, Mikayla had her first big scandal and her video received 54 million views and was all over social media. L'Oréal released a new mascara called Telescopic Lift and in the TikTok Mikayla posted about this mascara, there is a label that says “paid partnership.” Large creators often get backlash for taking paid partnerships even if a product review is clearly genuine. This is because when a company pays for a partnership, the creator will not be entirely truthful about the performance of the product. This has happened time and time again with popular influencers.
It’s also important to break down the anatomy of this video. The video begins with a stitch of another creator's video showing the real results she received from L'Oréal telescopic Lift mascara. Subsequently, Mikayla appears after the stitch carrying on about how the mascara “Literally just changed [her] life.” She then proceeds to put on one coat of mascara. Then, after she puts on the first coat she says that she's going to put on a second coat. Anyone familiar with mascara, and makeup in general, knows that no mascara can change from the initial coat to the second coat. If you look closely at the video, you can count her natural lashes that cluster together. Those 17 clusters seemingly disappear and lengthen significantly. Which can only be attributed to her putting false lashes on.
This video had so many people theorizing and talking about how the beauty industry is infiltrated with false advertising. The reaction to this video was mainly about the issue of untruthful advertising within the beauty industry. So much so, the scandal was titled “Lash Gate.” False advertising has been very prominent in the beauty industry for many years. The industry is polluted with photoshop, Facetune, filters, and tools to lie about products to receive money from beauty companies. In the YouTube beauty industry age, this became an issue for many of the popular creators and ultimately led to their stagnancy in success. Many beauty creators just want the money, and neglect being truthful about product reviews.
This impacted the advertising industry and had many questioning the regulations on advertisements/ brand deals.